About Dio-Met Fabrications

We are a family-run architectural metalwork manufacturer in Sheffield. We design, fabricate and install balconies, balustrades, staircases, handrails, glass floors and wine cellar doors, and we have been doing it from the same city for 35 years, since 1991.

Most of what we make is bespoke. A balcony that fits one house will not fit the next one, so almost everything that leaves our factory has been drawn, cut and welded for a specific opening on a specific building.

Everything is made in our own factory

We are a manufacturer, not a reseller. The steel is cut, welded, finished and quality checked in Sheffield by people we employ, which is why we can take on a shape somebody has sketched on the back of a drawing and tell them whether it will work. Thirty-five years of doing that adds up to thousands of jobs, from a single Juliet balcony to commercial staircase contracts.

It also keeps the price sensible. There is no importer's margin on top, and when something needs altering mid-job we walk into the workshop rather than raise it with a supplier in another country.

Anything complicated gets trial built before it leaves. Staircases in particular go up in the workshop first, get checked, then come apart for galvanising and delivery. It is easier to find a problem in Sheffield than on a site three hundred miles away.

Every finish we use is set out in detail on our material finishes and quality standards page: hot dip galvanizing, powder coating, stainless grades and toughened glass, and what is normal for each one when it arrives.

UKCA marked to BS EN 1090-2

Structural steelwork has to be manufactured under a certified factory production control system, and ours is. Every structural item we make is UKCA marked to BS EN 1090-2 and supplied with a Declaration of Performance for building control sign-off.

It is worth asking any fabricator for that certificate. A surprising number cannot produce one, and it is the document your building control officer will want to see.

Who we work for

Most of our customers are homeowners. Somebody has a set of French doors upstairs with nothing across them, or a landing that needs guarding, or a cellar they want to see into. We also work with developers, schools, offices and industrial sites.

You can have as much or as little of us as you want. We will survey, manufacture and install the whole thing, or make it to your sizes and send it out for your own fitter. Plenty of people take the second option and it is a perfectly sensible way to buy.

If we fit it, our own installers fit it

We do not subcontract installation. The people who turn up at your house are our own installers, they have fitted hundreds of these, and if something needs adjusting on the day they can deal with it there and then rather than ringing somebody else.

That is not how most of this trade works, and it is worth asking about. A supplier who sells you a balcony and then books a local fitter has no control over the part of the job you actually watch happening.

Delivery, nationwide and further

We deliver everything we make anywhere in the UK. Wine cellar doors and glass floors go a good deal further than that, regularly and all over the world. The United States and Canada are busy for us, and Norway comes up often. Everything is crated and palletised for export, and we handle the paperwork.

The largest we have sent out recently was a five by two metre walk-on glass floor and wine cellar hatch, shipped to Norway. It went out in sections, engineered to bolt together on site, which is how most large glass floors travel. Size is rarely the obstacle people expect it to be.

Send us the sizes and the delivery address and we will quote the freight with the job.

What customers say

We have 4.8 out of 5 from over 100 reviews on Google, the same on Trustpilot, 4.9 on Yell, and 100% positive feedback from over 78,000 eBay sales. You can read every one of them, and the emails customers have sent us over the years, on our testimonials page.

The one we are most pleased with came via a customer in Cumbria, passing on what his building control officer had said: that it was one of the nicest examples of that type of balcony he had seen.

See what we make

The clearest way to judge a fabricator is to look at the work.

• Our projects: a hundred or so jobs written up properly, with photographs and specifications. That is a sample, not the total — we have made and fitted thousands of these over thirty-five years, but these are the ones we have documented.
• Walkout balconies and Juliet balconies
• Metal and glass balustrades
• Metal staircases and fire escape stairs
• Walk-on glass floors and well covers
• Our building regulations guides: what the rules actually say, written by the people who make the things.

Come and see us, or just ring

There are a lot of websites in this trade with immaculate photographs, a contact form and not much else behind them. Some of them are marketing operations that will pass your job to somebody else. Some of the pictures are not even of real jobs.

So the simplest thing we can offer is this: come and see us. We are at 150 Worksop Road, Attercliffe, Sheffield S9 3TN. There is no showroom, it is a working factory, but you can see samples, whatever is in production that week, and there are always hinged glass floors here to stand on. Standing on one answers most of the questions people have about them.

Ring ahead so somebody is about. And whoever you end up buying from, ask them the same question, because a supplier who cannot show you where the work happens is worth a second thought.

Call 0114 243 9009 or email sales@diometonline.co.uk. Send a photograph of the opening and a rough size and we will tell you what we can build and what will fit.